Removals & Warnings

If your submission does not appear in the new queue, please contact us (be sure to include a link to the Reddit post (i.e. comments section), not the content you are linking). Simply deleting your post may cause the spam filter to catch future ones.

Note: Submissions from new users, and users with low karma, are automatically removed to help prevent spam.

Also, please contact us regarding spam, political or any other inappropriate videos, as this helps us remove them more quickly! When reporting, please explain why you think it should be removed.

Do not message moderators individually about posts not appearing in the new queue or ban appeals. Messages should be sent as a modmail to /r/Videos. Failure to do so may result in a ban.

Lego has insanely close tolerances in their blocks. There are noname brand Lego knock-offs from China but they are terrible, they just don't fit properly. Too tight, too loose, it's a mess. 3D printers don't even get close, it's gonna take many more years before they can print functional Lego replacements.

I own a personal 3D printer and I've tried to print LEGO style blocks and I've rarely got them to fit perfectly with actual LEGO. We are close but the cost of the plastic alone makes it virtually worthless to print LEGO.

If you need some weird block that doesn't exist I may be able to do it but it isn't going to be cheap.

yeah, Lego's real triumph is the incredible uniformity of their bricks. I have a feeling Lego would be fine with some sort of digital sales of downloads for their kits as long as there was a printer that met their standards of quality control. Since there aren't any at the moment below about $80k, that's at least a decade or so off. Still, I would be shocked to find that they didn't use 3D printers internally to test new parts out.

Following that line of logic, any company that manufactures small plastic parts should feel threatened by 3D printing technology.

I have access to about three printers at the moment, and I CG model and I can operate a ZCorp. I could very easily make a Barbie doll, or a toy firetruck, or even an imitation LEGO brick. But let's be realistic here. A 3D print LEGO kit would suck ass. No one can match their quality, and it would cost me more to 3D pint a kit than to buy the bricks I want online Plus, selling my bricks wouldn't net me any profit at all and I'd be violating copyright and trademark, besides. They wouldn't feel threatened at all.

That may be true now, but what about in 20 or 30 years as the technology improves and becomes cheaper? In the future, much of the crap we now have shipped to us from China will be created right in our home with a 3D printer. Some day there will be a category for 3D Blueprints on all the BT sites and Newsgroups. I'm sure LEGO and any other company that manufactures cheap plastic things that can easily be reproduced are keeping a very close eye on this technology. As time goes on, the complexity of items that can be fabricated at home will increase.

That's for the distant future. Realistically, we don't know if some other technology will come along and usurp 3D printing before it gets to the point where everyone has one in their home.

As of right now, though, 3D printing is only starting to become a viable means of making parts. Depending on the specific part and the location and economic status of the maker, it's either essential (like for the girl with the arm braces) or a novelty (like reddit geeks who make cool Mario statuettes). 3D printing is really only good for 'unique' items right now, things that you can't get anywhere else. It's not efficient for mass-producing things that could hurt the sales of a large company like LEGO. Even parts for manufacturing items like those cheap black plastic snap buckles for backpacks are cheaper injection-molded, and faster, too, than if you'd 3D print the same thing over and over again.

It's completely irrational to assume that the market could be hurt by something that could be used for making counterfeit 'crap'. But who in their right minds would? Even if the technology did improve, injection-molding is still tops in terms of quickness, quality versus pricing and exactness.

Even in my line of work, I'd still rather do a few silicone molds that cure overnight than print the same thing over and over again.

I don't think it has to be that distantly into the future. Notice that you are focusing on someone printing counterfeit versions in 3D and selling them through regular sales channels. No, this would probably not be viable any time soon.

But as soon with people having their own 3D printing, the entire distribution chain gets cut out. And you no longer need to match production with demand. That is intensely powerful. This means that we could have toys based on recent events and fads immediately available, and with production exactly equal to demand. If that's not a category killing business model, I don't know what is.

That'd be fascinating, actually. If every other household in first-world countries had a very high-functioning, quick and efficient 3D printer in their home, able to print with plastic and metal. And if these raw materials were inexpensive... easily bought and stored within the home, with an online system of purchasing files...

This is starting to sound eerily similar to the evolution of music distribution. Early history was vinyl and then 8-tracks, both of which were either extremely difficult to duplicate, especially vinyl, but the 8-tracks required specialized equipment.

That's about where we are, I think. Low-quality, relatively difficult to achieve for the average person.

Next came the cassette. Much easier to duplicate, but still not a magnificent copy. The quality on the original isn't amazing (cheap Chinese plastic toys would be analogous), but it was good enough.

This is quite possibly our next step, with better materials to put into the printers, higher resolution, and a greater variety of uses, plus the cost would probably drop to a point where a very large number of people would have the capabilities.

Next came CDs. The RIAA was already concerned in the 80s with cassettes. They lobbied and tried to derail home recordings, and so too did they lobby and try to derail CD copying. CDs were not easy to copy in the beginning. Blank discs were expensive, a CD-writer was EXTREMELY expensive, software and hardware were both quite unreliable, and things could get messy pretty easily with the poor-quality ink used in those early discs.

This would be our next step: Higher fidelity, faster duplication (the CDs could take about a quarter of the time to copy as they did to listen to, a big improvement over tape copying), and a near 1:1 copy of the data, with only a few bits lost. It was a way to make as perfect of a copy of the original music as was possible, and still pretty much is. You don't want your expensive hi-fi putting out a slightly worse version of Mozart, you get the actual CD. For most, it doesn't matter. So, for almost everyone, pretty much anything made with plastic would be available, but for a high price, probably costing almost as much as the original, so long as some industry guys can get taxes passed. This is a really scary time for toymakers...

Well, we have to move into the near-past now. When Napster was still going strong, cd copying was still a huge thing. Not many people had anything better than a dialup connection, and it was much faster to just copy a CD than download it. Write speeds were improved, media became cheaper, and software/hardware were catching up.

This is a hard analogue, but I suppose this would be the point when high-quality output is entirely possible, perhaps even making joints and such easily. Maybe incorporating some high-strength resins that can mimic low-quality metal in terms of strength. But something new is on the rise.

This is where things get even fuzzier. We're pretty much already talking about a ready-set distribution network, similar to MP3s, plus cost-effective 3D printers or something of that sort, so the rise of the MP3 is a moot point here. It's not analogous, but I think there is a phase that fits here...

Molecular sequencing, replicators, duplication machines, whatever you want to call them. This would be the penultimate step in copying physical objects. We're talking large machines that are fully capable of producing more of themselves while using, and possibly breaking down, matter. Obviously, nobody's sure if this is even possible. It certainly seems that, if it is, it would either require tremendous amounts of energy, or it would simply have to skirt past the law of conservation of energy, because if you can spend less energy making a battery than the battery can put out, there's a problem right there. But if it can copy matter at a molecular, or even atomic scale, then there's going to be a huge change in how things are done.

Do I think all or any of these future ones will happen? Well, refinement of the 3D printing process is inevitable. That part I'm sure of. We've already seen increases in resolution and decreases in price. At some point, we'll probably have the ability to walk into Best Buy, drop $50 on a cheap 3D printer, and $100 for the first refill of plastic. Don't doubt that HP is going to bring one out in the relatively near future that runs about $150 for the printer itself.

As for the matter replication? As I said before, I don't know if it's even possible to get something akin to the Star Trek replicators. The truth is, we're not actually talking about creating matter from energy here, so I suppose making a battery from elemental matter, restructuring things on an atomic scale, might be possible in the distant future. There wouldn't be more energy put into replicating the battery than the battery puts out because the elements are already there. That potential energy is always hidden in atoms, so as far as I understand, it wouldn't be defying thermodynamics really. Still, it may just be a pipe dream.

It will be interesting to see how quickly the industry either jumps on the bandwagon and helps develop proprietary filetypes to distribute their toys and such, or how quickly they jump in to retard the process. Let's hope that companies like Hasbro don't fall into the same rut that the RIAA and MPAA have and actually join in the revolution.

I have actually 3D printed custom designed LEGO parts using ABS plastic, and let me tell you, they don't even compare to the real deal. Sure, they might connect alright, but the texture is all wrong and they can be quite fragile.

I doubt they have any problem with 3D printers. Right now, 3d printed plastics are nowhere near the hardness, precision, and quality of injection-molded plastics. 3D printing has the advantage of low startup costs (1 or 2 thousand $ for a printer compared to a million or two for an injection molder, and $10k to $100k for a mold for a brick), but injection mold is far cheaper per piece and results in a better quality product.

Although, when 3D printing improves in quality and comes down in price, I could actually see LEGO selling 3D printers along with subscriptions to a "printable set of the month" subscription.

I actually think it would open up a market for them rather than threaten them. It will be a LONG time before 3D printing technology becomes sophisticated enough and the materials cheap enough to be competitive with their mass manufacturing process, not to mention the consistency of the precision in their blocks.

Of course the problem with mass manufacturing is that it's expensive to make a unique Lego piece that you might want. They could then develop the CAD drawings for those pieces to sell to people to use with their 3D printers. Pirating would be an issue though.

If I were Lego, I would simply just develop an open source community for the Lego enthusiasts out there.

They use humans to convert aerial photography to 3d building models in a Tom Sawyer system. Participants are given several photos from different angles and are asked to manually align corners. In just a few minutes, anyone can create an accurate model of a simple building. The imagery is then used to add textures to the 3d model.

You're right too; they have been using LIDAR data to get depth information for StreetView. This is useful for animating transitions between locations and for making surfaces in the photo clickable.

Don't let it intimidate you, you never know if you'll find your passion. I learned how to use 3dsmax way back in high school, it's a very easy to learn program. Practice makes perfect and if you keep it up you'll get very good. Relevant xkcd

I would say it went a little farther than "a few" people. I went to the world Maker Faire in New York City* for the past two years and it was incredible seeing the difference in 3d printers from last year to this year. In 2011 3d printers were projects that you had to build yourself. The interest wasn't too great. This year, however, MakerBot is mass producing these things. The MakerBot booth this year was packed every minute of the day. It was virtually impossible to walk through the pavilion. I'm not sure what youre seeing, but I see a great future for these.

* Yes I know that the Maker Faire is made up primarily by people who enjoy these things. Regardless, there was a huge shift in interest.

This could be easily done with a commercial grade Zcorp printer. Their base model is under 15k. I have no idea where you pulled 300k from. You could also send a print job like this to Shapeways. It would cost less than $50.

Wouldn't it be a hell of a lot easier and cheaper to use a CNC for this sort of stuff? Why are people so obsessed with 3d printers?
edit:
Whew, I can't respond to everyone, too many people.

To people saying that 3d printers are better at certain things than cncs, yeah that's probably true. But there are very, very few objects that can't be broken up into several parts (the stuff in the video could easily be broken up into several parts and still line up seamlessly).

The color part is definitely valid... but there's something there that just doesn't jive with me. Think about all the colors he would have had to use to make that stuff. Is it like 50 shades of brown, or is it doing some kind of alternate pixel thing with only 3 colors? If it's the former that's extremely impractical and expensive. If it's the latter, then the kind of resolution you would need is astounding (holy hell expensive).

The pieces should could have been made with a cnc and hand painted without too much trouble (and serveral orders of magnitude cheaper).

Using 3-axes in a CNC mill lets you make a lot of stuff, but you're still reasonably limited. 3D printing is additive so you can built more complex structures without requiring more axes (more axes=more motors, more complex control). The downfall is that hobby level 3D printing kind of blows. It's cool for the novelty and for things that don't require fine detail.

CNCs can't print in color, the output of these really expensive 3d printers is actually done with colored base materials, not painted. The machine shop at my college gave out these 3d printed dice last year to promote their program.

You can machine things like that on a CNC as long as you get a fused block that looked like that. The advantage of a 3D printer is that you can do some work that's literally not really possible to do with a CNC mill, even a multi axis CNC. For example something like this.

While the back side would take a pretty high quality 3D printer I'm not sure you couldn't print most of the front side with a standard projector style 3D printer, like a form 1. They can get pretty small and only cost 3k. (though the materials are more expensive)

Would depend on the printer. The majority of printers do a single color and it can be painted. Some do add color when printing, but these are usually $10K+ range, and the coloring looks worse than what's in this video. There are some $20K+ printers/services that could hit that coloring however.

We used zcorp printers for printing the replacement faces for Paranorman. They were in full color. Getting the colors to match exactly can be difficult. Looks like the ones in the video match very well.

Me and my spouse's first thought; "What if they put lego in the Colosseum?"
Obviously no go on the 'mockery of an Architectural Wonder' front... but what if, when it came time, this very same technique could preserve a historical site and extend it's lifespan?
EDIT: Just one 98%

this isn't really a technologically impressive display of 3d printing on its own as it's just small single pieces based on a 3d model. what's more impressive is the use of photographs and digital manipulation to bring the environment into the 3d modelling software. for those in this field i'm sure it's not all that special as they do this for movies all the time, but it's certainly one of the most creative, regardless.

impressive 3d printing to me was when a guy in my office made an engine block complete with working pistons in a single print on our objet printer

the practicalities of 3d printing might elude most people right now. Especially considering the price point and usefullness of affordable 3d printers (ie below 2000 dollar/euro). But even with those crude tools people can create incredibly usefull parts and models. However in 10 to 20 years 3d printing technology is gonna explode to the consumer market and defy all notions of modern manufacturing. Even if that means you are not gonna go to a store to buy a chair , but go to a store to print a chair. Manufacture on demand instead of manufucture for EXPECTED demand.